Tuesday, August 1, 2017

Russian Public Life Today is Not Just a Battle of Individuals but a Struggle of Ideologies, Pastukhov Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, August 1 – Despite the
conviction of many that conflicts among opposition figures are simply battles
among individuals, Vladimir Pastukhov says, “an ideological struggle in
post-communist Russia not only exists but is proceeding within a long
discredited mental paradigm” which explains why Russian history, its
reflection, is a vicious circle.

The recent debates between Aleksey
Navalny and Igor Strelkov, the St. Antony’s College historian says, are “the
clearest public clash in recent years of all the main Russian ideological
trends at the new turn of Russian history,” a clash that involves “not two but
three,” the last being the spirit of the Russian liberal opposition (republic.ru/posts/85454).

“In
the final analysis, Navalny and Strelkov appealed not so much to the
nationalists … as to the liberal audience. [That is,] they discussed not the nationalist
but the liberal agenda.” And “at the center of debates was one single question
which has political and economic meaning in Russia – the question about power.”

Navalny
has been criticized for failing to detail his program, but in fact, Pastukhov
suggests, duringn the debate everthing that one needs to know about his views
on politics in Russia” because “he expressed his attitude toward state power.”

Pastukhov
says that “in Russia there is not and cannot be a political ideology” in the
Western sense “because Russia as in the past remains a pre-political society…
[Thus] the right-left matrix doesn’t apply to Russia as it was constructed as a
derivative involving relations to private property which did not and does not
exist in Russia.”

“Having
expressed his attitude toward power,” the Russian historian continues, “a
Russiann politician answers the question about his program in an exhaustive
way. One needn’t knw anything more about it or him in an ideological sense.”

According
to Pastukhov, there are a total of “three traditional points of view on this
sensitive issue for Russia:

First,
there is the patriotic or Slavophile position, whch Strelkov embodies. For
those who hold this view, “the powers are a prior good” and justify themselves
by existing. “Democracy is not only unnecessary but even dangerous since it is
capable of destroying the natural unity of power and the people and become a
weapon in the hands of plutocrats as well as the foreign and domestic enemies
of Russia.”

Second,
there is the liberal or Westernizer position to which both Navalny and Strelkov
appealed. For it, “power is a prior evil: it opposes society its interests are
opposed to the interests of society and therefore it must be controlled, contained
and forced to act in the interests of society in spite of its egoistic and ‘bloodsucking’
instincts.”

And
third, there is the progressive, that is revolutionary-democratic
position.That is Navalny’s position. It
holds that “power by itself is neutral and everything depends in whose hands it
is held: if it is in ‘bad’ hands, then it will be ‘reactionary’ and must be
opposed; if it is in ‘good’ hands, that is, progressive ones, it must be
supported.”

Put
in lapidary terms, Pastukhov says, “the three ruling ideological trends in
Russia today can be summarized in the following way: power must be served (the
patriots), power must be fought (the liberals) and power must be used (the
progressives).”

At
first glance, these appear quite far apart, but they really aren’t as distant
from one another as all that. “They have a common platform: the Russian
patriots, the Russian liberals and the Russian revolutionary democrats (progressives)
recognize the objective inevitability and even necessity of the existence in Russia
of a harshly centralized, built from top down, vertically integrated state.”

In
short, they all accept the Leviathan state as a demiurge and vie society as “an
infantile youth incapable of any independence and more than that capable of
committing a mass of stupidities and even calling forth a universal catastrophe
if suddenly they separate themselves from the supervision of the state.”

The
problem is that thinking in this way the liberals have no chance of coming to
power except as a result of some cataclysm.The progressive Bolshevik types do have a change because they seek power
above all and will do what is necessary to seize the state. But neither of them
or of course the patriots will challenge the autocratic state.

“Autocracy,”
Pastukhov says, “in the final analysis can be
extremely varied: Orthodox, communist, anti-communist, corrupt and even
anti-corrupt.”But the fundamental
vicious cycle of Russian history won’t be broken until the vicious cycle of
Russian thought is broken and Russia adopts “at a minimum” three fundamental
reforms.

First
of all, there must be rules that prevent anyone from remaining in power for
very long and ensure the circulation of elites. Second, he says, there must be
a fundamental decentralization of power. And third, there needs to be a clear transition
to a parliamentary republic or “as a variant,” a parliamentary-presidential
one.

Rephrasing
a popular political notion in the past, “one can say that “all previous
ideologies have put as their goal the modernization of Russian autocracy … now
the time has come to demolish it.”That requires
that the opposition come together to get power and only then debate their
differences. Worrying about the latter first ensures that it won’t take
power.

There
is a clear example of what is at stake if the two opposition trends don’t come
together. That was in Germany in the early 1930s when the two main opposition
groups decided their differences were more important than anything else and
thus lost out, opening the way to the rise of Hitler.

Or
put another, Pastukhov concludes, “present day Russian politics reminds one of
a computer game: in it, there are many levels, and one must not jump to the next
level without fulfilling the program of the previous one.”